Web Of Deceit

Given its global reach, the Internet seems a perfect medium for
furthering cultural awareness. Yet, as always with technology, some
not-so-obvious issues cast doubt on that assumption. Having taught in
the United States and abroad, I have helped young people from many
parts of the world work together on Internet projects that focus on
their lives and lands, and these experiences have led me to wonder
whether electronic "cultural exchanges" do more to mislead students
than to educate them.

For the past five years, I have been involved with designing and
coordinating high school telecomputing projects under the umbrella
title "Utopian Visions." Not long after I started, I attended a
workshop at which a national Net figure extolled the virtues of
electronic multicultural exchanges. As an example, she spoke of a group
of 4th graders in North Carolina who shared information about their
lives with students in Alaska. "What struck these students most," the
woman said, "was that students in Alaska eat at Pizza Hut just like
they do." Her point—which was greeted with nods of approval from
the audience—was that such exchanges are often valuable not so
much to help students discover the differences in people from different
parts of the world but to help them see the similarities.

Eating at Pizza Hut is a pretty superficial similarity. But this Net
expert is right in a more troubling way. Regardless of where they live
in the world, students with Net access most certainly are much more
similar than they are dissimilar; they share, I fear, a common
techno-culture that subsumes local cultures.

I taught for several years in Quito, Ecuador, at Academia Cotopaxi,
a private international school that is one of the few K-12 schools in
that country with Internet access. Although differences in customs
separated the Ecuadorian students attending Cotopaxi and the Iowa
students I taught back in the United States and the German students I
would teach later, all these youngsters shared a remarkably similar
world view. By contrast, a veritable canyon separated those Cotopaxi
students and the poverty-stricken Ecuadorian children living just 20
miles outside the city. The lives and lifestyles of these children were
typical of both the high Andean and Amazon basin indigenous groups that
still make up a sizable part of Ecuador's population. They attended
schools without indoor plumbing, much less a telephone, and they lived
in houses with thatched roofs and followed traditions that predate the
Incas.

But it was the affluent youngsters, a small group accustomed to
cable TV and vacations in Miami, who conveyed their impressions of life
in Ecuador to other similarly influenced, techno-elite children around
the world. This global network of techno-haves reinforces each others'
impressions that they live in a homogeneous thought-world, leading Net
gurus to extol the virtue of the Internet as a means for discovering
commonalities among "all" people of the world. The irony is, of course,
that the similarities being discovered are those that technology itself
has spread.

This illusion of the world as a place united in common values was
made even more clear to me during one of the Utopian Visions projects I
coordinated. We started the project by asking the students involved
from around the world to send e-mail messages describing their visions
of a utopian society. When more than 100 students fired off their
vision statements to us, we faced the monumental task of separating,
sorting, and posting each message on the project's World Wide Web site.
I gave instructions that were aimed at speeding the process but
resulted instead in disaster: The students stripped out the identifying
information from the messages. Without that information, we had no idea
where in the world they had come from.

Discovering the mistake, I suggested that the students read each
utopian statement with an eye for lingual quirks and other clues to its
origin. Because these were visions of a perfect society, I figured that
we would pin down the home continent of each author at the very least.
But the students reported little success. I chuckled at
this—perhaps these Midwestern kids lack multicultural awareness,
I figured, and I took on the investigation myself. Having lived on
three continents, I assumed I would easily spot different cultural
orientations. But I fared no better. The more than 100 statements came
from Australia, Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, and North America,
but in the vast majority, we could detect no cultural fingerprints.

Perhaps the world really is beginning to sing in perfect harmony.
But I don't think so. To me, this youthful global village is more
reminiscent of the self-justifying clubbiness of the far-flung
colonials of the British Empire of just a century ago. As these Brits
milled about in their exclusive communities, their transplanted British
culture was so self-contained and insulated that for most, the
indigenous cultures they ruled over were rendered invisible.

That indigenous cultures are invisible on the Net seems beyond
dispute (though well-intentioned techno-elites—including
me—occasionally try to give them a presence on-line). And
providing "equitable" access is not the answer. As Jerry Mander's In
the Absence of the Sacred and Stephan Kill's The Tragedy of Technology
make depressingly clear, non-technological societies cannot communicate
electronically without changing the way they think, the way they act,
the way they live—in other words, without abandoning their
traditional cultures. So experiencing their way of thinking through Net
communications is impossible. Yet children all over America now look at
exotic pictures from National Geographic and Microsoft's Encarta
thinking that they are getting a taste of the lives of the people
portrayed there by corresponding with fellow techno-haves who happen to
live in the same country. It is an illusion I have found few American
teachers prepared to unveil.

Not only are we deceiving our children about these non-technological
cultures, but the spread of the global communications grid seems to be
playing a big role in exterminating them. We know that culture is tied
closely to language. Linguists estimate that half the world's 6,000
languages will become extinct in the next century and that 2,000 of the
remaining languages will be threatened during the 22nd century.
Certainly the spread of the Net, which has increased the demand for the
use of regional, national, and global languages like English, Spanish,
and Japanese, will accelerate this trend.

And we in education face a paradox that too few recognize: Our
students, in seeking out multicultural experiences through the
Internet, contribute to the demise of those very societies that provide
the only really fundamental cultural diversity left on the planet.

For the opinions of experts, including Lowell Monke, and an in-depth
discussion on technology's role in the classroom, read the messages
from Education Week's November Town
Meeting.

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